Sticky #44

Happy Halloween!  I know last week I said I would see you in December, but I had one last sticky to sneak in before November came around.  I’ve done all my cleaning for the month (I washed the floors AND the bathrooms!), and I’ve finally gotten a decent amount of sleep to start the month off right.  Now all that’s left to do is hand out candy and stay up til midnight watching Where the Wild Things Are so I can get the first few words in before bed.

And speaking of NaNo, I’ve heard a lot of people this year saying that they are going to try, even if they don’t think they will win.  I think that’s great.  It’s not really the winning that is the great thing about NaNo – it’s the writing.  It’s getting out something that needs to come out.  And even if you can only get out ten thousand words in November, that’s still ten thousand words.  It gives you something to work off of.  And it’s ten thousand more words than most people in the world have written.  So even if you try, and “fail”, it’s still better than not trying at all because you are scared of failing.

Which brings us to this week’s sticky.  The High Priestess of Fie Eoin happens to be a very smart person.  She’s also a very tormented person, because she had the chance to save Fennec’s life and didn’t, because she was afraid she would kill him.  So he died anyway, and she’s been living with that guilt for eight years, and is now trying to save Kaye from the same fate.  I thought her words were appropriate for all those people who are afraid to do NaNo because they might fail.  If you don’t do something you will certainly fail at it, but if you try you just might discover you can write 50,000 words in 30 days.  Or save someone’s life.

Sticky #43

I’ve been pretty bad the past few weeks about putting up stickies.  The first weekend I missed I was in Washington DC visiting my little sister and my new brother-in-law, and after that NaNoWriMo got in the way.  What’s that, you say?  NaNo is in November?  Not if you’re an ML like I happen to be this year – then NaNo starts in October with planning Kick-Off Parties and Write-Ins, trying to put together goodie bags and print out workbooks, and beating your region into RSVPing and deciding on a region name (we are currently deciding between Sweet Tea Wrimos and Swamp Things).  So between my birthday, my trip to DC, and NaNo, October has been a busy month for me!  Thank god next month all I have to do is write a 50,000 word novel.  Although I still can’t promise to keep up with the stickies next month.

Speaking of NaNo – this week’s sticky comes from last year’s NaNo Novel, Phooka Tales.  The premise of the book is that Holly’s fiance’ breaks up with her while she’s oversees for her job.  This sticky shows how she feels while at work the next day.  When something shitty like that happens it’s always nice to have something to take your mind off of it, but you can still feel it there, sitting inside you, and once you mind is on it again, forget trying to get anything done!  No wonder Holly goes a bit crazy.

Now I’m off to get my soundtrack ready for this year’s Noveling Adventure.  See you in December!

Sticky #42

Happy Feast of Eoin!  Today is the feast dedicated to Fie Eoin’s war god, Eoin, and the day that new warriors are inducted.  There is a big celebration, a ceremony for the inductees, and a lot of drinking, eating, and dancing.  This day marks the end of the long, hot training season and the beginning of the harvest season when they prepare for winter.  This day also happens to coincide with my birthday   Or maybe that’s not so random at all.

Today’s sticky is from the Feast of Eoin, describing a little bit of the general scene.  There is a lot going on during the Feast and I wanted to give a quick general overview of it.  Plus, I was listening to some Loreena McKennitt yesterday and that always makes me think of Fie Eoin.  So I jotted this down in the middle of sweeping the floor and plan on getting it into the story sometime before November.  Because you know what happens in November, don’t you?

www.nanowrimo.org

Sticky #41

I don’t know what it is about autumn, but as soon as the temperatures begin to cool down (and cool here is around eighty-five degrees) I get very creative.  Maybe it’s the upcoming NaNo, or maybe it’s the body’s natural response to the coming winter where everyone stays indoors for long periods of time.  Either way, I’ve been dreaming strange dreams lately and turning them into stories in the daytime.  This week’s sticky is from one such dream about Mackinac Island.  If you’ve never heard of Mackinac Island, go rent the movie Somewhere In Time – it takes place there and the island hasn’t really changed at all.  There are no cars, everyone gets around by bike or horse, and all the houses are old Victorian style.  It’s a very charming island, but in my dream they quarantined the island from the mainland because of a plague (swine flu, maybe?), and 100 years or so later it was still quarantined.  Turns out, being stuck on a small island like that for a century can turn a group of people crazy, and what started off as a nice horse-filled romp around the island became a dangerous escape from people who purportedly believed in Reason above all else.

Of course, the girl in this sticky IS reasonable, and she doesn’t choose death, but she gets herself in a load of trouble anyways.  I’m still not sure what happens to her in the end – it may be a tragedy – but I’m pretty sure her own version of reason wins out over her crazy father’s version.

And if you are ever in the upper Lower Peninsula of Michigan, you really should visit Mackinac Island.  Their fudge is the best in the world.

Sticky #40

 

This week you are getting almost two stickies for the price of one!  How lucky do you feel? 

I’ve been splitting my time lately between Fie Eoin and Phooka Tales.  With another NaNoWriMo almost upon us I’ve finally let Phooka Tales sit long enough to go back and start editing (and sometimes I just have days where I want a little Brett in my life), but Fie Eoin is my first baby and Kindra and Gar are very demanding.  They don’t let FE sit dormant for long.  I’ve also been storylining the Apollo and Daphne story, although I still need a name for that one.

This week you are getting almost two stickies for the price of one!  How lucky do you feel? 

This sticky was written well before the idea for Apollo and Daphne came to be.  In fact, this story was written before NaNo last year, because I never did use that bottom half in Phooka Tales.  I just wrote down everything that happened in the lab I worked in as inspiration for the story.  By the time it came to write PT, I didn’t use most of what I had written down.  A large chunk of in-lab storytelling was left by the wayside because it wasn’t as interesting as what happens when the creatures begin appearing.  The in-lab stuff was just my cathartic way of dealing with work stress without quitting (or going crazy and seeing creatures myself!).  I highly recommend writing stories where you fire all of your co-workers to relieve stress.   

The top half of the sticky was me trying to decide how to introduce Gar’s friends into Fie Eoin.  At first I had Gar introducing them to her as she joined them for breakfast on her first morning as a Warrior.  But then I realized that their village isn’t that large, and Kindra would already know all of his friends from childhood.  So I needed a new way to introduce them.  I used the same part of the story to introduce the different groups in Fie Eoin – the senior warriors, the new warriors, the women and what they do while all the warriors are out being warriors all day.  I think you can tell that the warriors are my favorite part.

Sticky #39

So perhaps you have noticed my distinct lack of posting for the past two weeks, and my sudden reappearance with not only a star sticky, but a star sticky about weddings.  You know what star stickies mean around here – it means something awesome has happened.  And it just so happens that my awesome little sister got married last weekend!  Thus, I am honoring it with a star sticky about my two favorite characters and their wedding.

I’d love to ramble on and on about my little sis’ wedding, but I doubt you are interested.  So instead I’ll tell you that during Kindra’s night in “sweat” (a sauna-tent used to purify yourself before rituals, such as weddings, warrior ceremonies, and other special occasions) she was sent a vision of her ancestor, Ian Odion – the man who brought the Tribes of Aleda from the Faye Lands.  I won’t tell you what the vision is yet, except that it has to do with the founding of Fie Eoin (the tribe of Ian).

Sticky #38

 

I am happy to say that I did not come up with anymore NaNo ideas this past week, so I will still be working on Apollo and Daphne in November (as of right this moment, which may change).  I’m trying to work different parts of the myths in, including the part about Daphne turning into a Bay Laurel.  Unfortunately, in this day and age people don’t just turn into trees.  Instead I think I’ll have her smell like the tree in question (a bay laurel tree is rather potent) and at the end she will either die (major angst for Apollo, since his last girlfriend, Hyacinth, died in a freak discus accident) or he’ll stalk her until she’s forced to change her name to Laurel and move out of the city.  While the stalking and name changing would follow the plot of the myth more closely, I’m just not sure I want to make Apollo into that much of a bad guy.  He’s not a bad guy at all, he just obsesses.  Of course, making her car crash into a tree (thus, melding the human with the tree!) doesn’t make him much of a good guy either.

Either way, I think he’s just going to have to look like an obsessive jerk near the end of the story.

And Flight 1082 was my husband’s flight number the day I wrote this sticky.  I didn’t want to waste an entire sticky just to write down a flight number, so I tacked it on the bottom of this one (you’ve probably seen it before).

Sticky #37

So, remember last weekend when I said I had found my next NaNo Novel idea?  I found two more this week.  One is an idea I’ve been cultivating since my first NaNo back in 2005.  The main character is a pretty quiet guy, so I ended up writing Lane’s Girl instead, just because I couldn’t get Mio to say enough (Lane, however, never stops talking and we finished NaNo that year in 19 days).  This week while watching the History Channel I found a setting that would work perfectly for Mio’s story.  I still don’t trust him to talk enough to do a NaNo though, so that will be something I write outside of November (plus, I have to do a lot of research for that novel, since it will be historical fiction and I’m not yet an expert on Roman Britain).

So that left me with last week’s book idea about the world-hopper, or the third idea I had this week: Apollo and Daphne.  If you’ve never read Ovid’s Metamorphoses, you are missing out on a plethora of ancient mythology.  These have been some of my favorite stories since I was a child and first read the story of Orpheus and Eurydice.  Unfortunately, a lot of people are turned off by the style of writing in Metamorphoses (just ask my husband what he thinks of it!) so I thought I would re-tell the story in the context of today’s world.  It sounds like bad fanfiction on the surface - take the Greek gods and throw them into high school – but I think the story of Apollo and Daphne can really speak to young readers.  It’s about first love, about losing your first love, about never even getting your first love although you try and try.  And in my version it will take place in Olympia, WA instead of Olympia, Greece.

As you can probably tell, it didn’t take me long to change my mind and decide to write my NaNo Novel about Apollo and Daphne instead of the world-hopper.  And you are sure to see more stickies about it in the near future, since I have already filled one page of my writing notebook with stickies I brought home from work.

Sticky #36

The other weekend when I was writing the Writing Prompt Challenge I had this really strange dream about travelling to other worlds (well, only one other world), which isn’t all that odd considering how big a fan I am of Stephen King’s Dark Tower Series.  But it wasn’t in the vein of the Dark Tower at all, nor did it have Rebecca and Lane in it (who are characters inspired by the DT).  Instead it had some high school girl and a guy I knew many years ago named Pete.  I pretty much ignored the dream at the time, because I was too involved with Phooka Tales and then Fie Eoin to bother.  But this week I started thinking about the dream again, because it would not be forgotten, and I realized that I had just found my next NaNo Novel!  Strange books lend themselves well to NaNo, and the end of the dream was certainly strange.  But I cannot remember anything in the middle of the dream.  Just the beginning and the end.  So I started storylining, and jotted down the notes on stickies.  You’ll probably see more of these stickies as we get closer to November, but right now I only have three names (Anna, Atur/Peter, and Kester/Christopher) and a vague idea of what is going to happen (bad guys, world hopping, amulets).  I’m not even sure yet if Atur is the bad guy, Kester is the bad guy, or neither of them are a bad guy. 

And if Anna’s world poisons Atur and Kester’s world, how do they eat our food?  Atur told her that’s why they travelled to her world, for food and medicine they couldn’t get in their own, but that seems kind of suspicious to me….

Sticky #35

 

First, let me apologize for the size of today’s sticky.  I scanned it with a bunch of other stickies and if I shrink it down any further it gets blurry and hard to read.  That has never happened before – I think it’s the light blue.  I might just have to stick with purple.

Today’s sticky is from Pike’s Revenge.  Yeah, I know you thought it was Fie Eoin because Kindra is in it, but Pike’s Revenge is the sequel to Fie Eoin, and although she is no longer the main character she doesn’t exactly hide herself away.  I almost used this sticky as my Father’s Day sticky, but it just didn’t give me the same warm, fuzzy feeling that Lane did.  Not that Kindra can’t give you a warm, fuzzy feeling.  I’m finding that in the re-write her relationship with Gar is a lot more warm and fuzzy than I initially thought.  Her relationship with Pike is even less warm and fuzzy than I thought, and I have to admit I have really enjoyed both parts of the book.  And poor Barracuda is caught in the middle of that hostility, and is the least hostile person you could meet (you may recall Sticky #7 in which Kindra’s daughter harasses him).  But don’t let him fool you like he fooled Kindra.  He’s not weak.